Sunday, December 28, 2008

Apple Store Meltdown / Personal spiritual rebirth



I went out in the rain with my laptop during a night of significant fun.
The thing is dead.
All my copy-written itunes music, all my memory-heavy videos for future projects, every meaningless/ful picture in my jpeg folder.

gone.

And I have never felt this kind of freedom.

Trust me, at first I was pissed. All that work! All those saved ichat conversations!
Every preparation I had made to explain digital humanity/philosophy/ spirituality = wasted.

Yet, before undertaking a great spiritual journey, is it not fitting to "purge" oneself?

(Digital spirituality remedy = clean hard drive)

I am going to mexico in 4 hours, where I was planning on writing a proposal for A REVOLUTIONARY DIGITAL HUMANITIES MAJOR.

But now all of my notes have been rendered inert silicon.

my grandfather died, my family is a wreck, I'm still stressed from school and in-all, our "spirits" are low. I will not be bringing a computer to the aztec ruins. I plan on having an awakening. I do not need to check on the rest of the world through a screen. I will feel it through my feet. Laugh, but I'm serious.

When I return, I invite you all to help me monitor human technophilia, moderate our detrimental digital habits, perfect college-level new media education and... slow down our overclocked society so as to improve the quality of life for all.

She was a great laptop, I'm going to miss her.

See you in 2009.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Escaping into the Digital


My Grandfather died. My friends' grandmother is dying. Both families are freaking out.


So, we played Gears of War 2 for a week straight, and escaped into the digital.


Fallout 3 has since taken its place for me. Family infighting and my responsibilities to work/myself can be conveniently set aside and replaced with AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WORLD.

Trick is, you can't stop playing or the problems come back worse. It's like drinking. And I would have drank myself silly with Fallout 3 and GTA4, but I haven't.

Now that I was a new media theorist (yeah, alright,hah) I couldn't help realizing what I was doing: immersing myself in a fiction so as to avoid the negative aspects of reality.

But isn't Christianity the same thing?